


Meant to be Broken

by tahoesage



Series: Meant to be Broken [1]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Hotch/former victim, Learning how to love again, Lots of mentions of burns and scars, Slow Build, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-07-29 11:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 13,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7683091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahoesage/pseuds/tahoesage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her case was one that was hard to forget. Now, five years after saving Amelia Harper's life, Aaron meets her again...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She awoke to strange sounds. Sounds she hadn’t heard for a long, long time. Don’t ask her how long, though. She couldn’t even begin to say. These were the sounds of people. Feet. She thought he was gone. She’d been content. She’d been just waiting. For something she didn’t understand. Something strange.

She scuttled into the corner and got into position. It was him, back after the very long time, and he would need her just like this. Her muscles ached deep, her thighs shallow. She couldn’t sit up right, her head didn’t want to stay up. He wouldn’t like that. Her shoulders were floppy, too. Like that doll she’d had when she was seven. The doll had a name, but don’t ask her what it was. She didn’t know.

The foot sounds were different. He must have brought friends. She didn’t know he had friends. If he did have friends, he would have brought them before. Since they had company, she really needed to be good. Her shoulders though, they weren’t working right. The doll had a mouth, and once upon a time she had imagined the doll could talk. It was a silly idea. Dolls didn’t talk.

Voices now too. He brought a lot of friends. More than one, even. This must be very important. She really needed to behave or else he would be mad and that wasn’t good. He probably missed her. She thought he was gone forever. But he wasn’t. Even though she had started waiting.

This was the bad corner. The shallow ache in her thighs felt cold with her breath. She needed to be quiet but it was hard. Her lungs were very small right now. They did that sometimes when he was coming, like they wanted to conserve their strength. She had to take very deep breaths to get enough air.

His friends were saying something now, a word. She didn’t recognize it. It started soft but ended firm. It was very loud. She was sure she had heard it before. It sounded like the doll. Even though the doll didn’t talk, the doll had a name. His friends were saying a word that was like the doll’s name. It had a sound that sounded similar in it. She opened her mouth and tried to make the sound. It didn’t come out right. It never did. Especially when it was so hard to get a breath in. Maybe it wasn’t her lungs. Maybe it was the air. It was going away. His friends were using it all up to say that word. She tried to make the sound again. She opened her mouth but her tongue was stuck to the top. She needed to be better about the water corner but the last little bit of time she didn’t seem to be able to get over to the corner.

His friends were louder now. Their sounds filled her head to the brim. She recognized the word. People used to call her that word. They were so loud now. She tried to put her hands on her ears but they kept slipping down. The air was less and less. She realized that part of the loud sound she was hearing was her. She was making it. But she couldn’t stop. She was making the noise that she couldn’t before but louder. It was the first part of her name and the first part of the doll’s name. It went ahh. She wished they would be quieter. She wished she could stop making the sound. Her hands were slippery. She had touched the pain spot on her thigh. They were so loud now. She wished she knew what they wanted. She wished they would be quiet. Now they were making other noises, noises that weren’t the name that sounded like her doll’s and used to belong to her. He was probably mad. He had been gone a long time and this was what he was going to find. She wished she could stop making the noise.

There were door noises now. He and his friends were about to come in but she was making the noise still. She tried to stop but couldn’t. She tried to breathe but couldn’t. She tried to keep her head tall but couldn’t. She tried to make her shoulders right but couldn’t.

Then everything was loud, there was nothing that wasn’t loud, the loudness was so loud that it even was loud to her eyes. There were a lot of people and she realized that these probably weren’t his friends because he never made it this loud on her eyes. Bright. That’s what it was. Bright. The noises got louder and she couldn’t tell who was making them but she made herself small to make it go away. All of it, even the bright. That way she didn’t have to try to make her arms do what she wanted and her head could fall on its own.

Then it was normal again except that it was still bright inside her head. When she closed her eyes she saw the brightness. It was blue. A long time ago she used to like that thing, blue. Amelia, that’s what they were saying. Except now it was just one person saying it and it was like him but different. And now there was only one person. And that one person was a him, just like him.

This new him was getting louder. He was making sounds with his body, not his mouth. She was still trying to get air. She thought it would be better because there was not as many people but it still was hard. He was using the air, just like her, only he was breathing normal. She could hear him breathing. It wasn’t like the breathing when the other him, the bad him, came in and touched her. This new him was breathing like she wished she could breathe. He kept saying her name and getting louder. Closer, that’s what he was getting. Something warm and dry touched her now. It was a different feeling than she’d felt in a very long time. And she could smell him too. Not like the bad him. This him smelled different. He smelled loud. She hadn’t smelled something other than her smell for a very long time. The long time when the bad him was gone.

Something else touched her. It was clothes, maybe. It was soft. Like the doll. Annie. That’s the doll’s name. That was the doll’s name. And her name, her name was Amelia. He said it too, her name. And then it happened.

This new him—no, he was a man, that’s what he was—touched her in another place and then she was flying. He talked to someone and she tried to answer but he said something she recognized besides her name.

He said “ _it’s okay_.”

He said “ _we’re here to help you_.”

He was holding her. Holding her like she used to hold Annie. And there were other people but they were good too. And he smelled clean, like food.

Something went on over her eyes. It felt smooth. The man that was holding her told her it was to protect her eyes. For a moment she didn’t know what he was talking about but then her brain remembered what eyes were. And then it got brighter, but not too bright. And then she was being laid on something soft. She felt herself going up and sliding into something, and then there were other hands on her. More hands than the new man had. And other voices too, making noises. Everything was getting fuzzled around the edges except the man.

Why was he getting quieter?

Where were his hands? Was he still there? He wasn’t. She must have done something very very wrong to make him go away like this.

She asked for him but the new people didn’t listen. They wanted to know about other things that didn’t matter. No. No. NO. They didn’t understand. Where was he? Was he gone forever?

The new people didn’t care. They kept saying things to her and she kept trying to talk. And they were hurting her too. With claws and pokes. They were just like him. The bad him. She tried to stand up but they stopped her. She tried to use her arms but they were tied down. She yelled. She needed help. She thought she was safe for a moment. She was wrong.

Everything stopped. She tried so so hard to break the ties. Something touched her head. A hand. She bit it. She screamed louder.

Finally she heard him again. He touched her wrist. He told her she was going to be okay. He told her she was safe. He said he’d go with her to someplace, and she didn’t know where that someplace was but she felt okay. Because he was soft and quiet. Mostly, because he was there.

The last thing she remembered before another stretch of nothing was a word.

His name.

_Aaron._

 

_to be continued...  
_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Aaron sits at a bar and grill after a long day of work in Pennsylvania, he sees a woman who looks distinctly familiar...

As a rule, Aaron Hotchner usually avoided establishments like this. When he drank he liked to drink alone, Jack settled in to sleep, just himself and maybe some memories from a hard case that needed softening. He’d read the paper, he’d read one of Rossi’s books, he’d read reports. A sip of bourbon every three or so pages until either the book or the glass bottomed out and then to bed.  
He didn’t like being alone at bars. Their anonymity bothered him. It seemed that by the very nature of his being there he had something to hide or to hide from. He wasn’t suited to this environment: he didn’t usually meet people to drink and he didn’t drink to meet people. Besides, bars were his and Haley’s thing. He hadn’t tainted that in the years since the divorce and the many months since her death.  
Just being here made him feel uncomfortable. There was a certain kind of man who draped himself over the bar with bourbon in hand, donned in a suit and tie, and he wasn’t that man. But then again, this wasn’t entirely a bar. There was an open doorway and then it turned into an all-American small-town steakhouse. He rolled his shoulders, surreptitiously cracked his knuckles, anything to get himself to relax. He wished the hotel had bourbon. He wished his ear wasn’t ringing, something that had been happening lately when he was under extended stress. For nearly eight hours, he and Morgan had interviewed Blake Richards, the by-now infamous River City Ripper, who spent the entire day either smirking at the two of them, demanding to be taken to the dump site of his last victim, or asking where Gideon was. Not even Jack in the middle of the aptly named ‘Terrible Twos’ had been so stubborn and insolent.  
He wished he was home. With Jack. Reflexively, he checked his phone. No missed calls, one text: Jack was in bed. He had macaroni for dinner. Jessica took him grocery shopping. This morning, he got a toy car in his cereal. Aaron put his phone back in his pocket and willed himself not to check in until 9:30, an hour from now.  
Through the doorway, a small family ate at a booth. There was a little girl who idly colored the kids’ menu in with crayons, a man eyeing his own menu and a woman trying to pick for the daughter. The woman’s glinting ring finger told Aaron that they were married, their relaxed posture told him that they were happy. The mother pointed to something on the girl’s menu and the girl nodded. The father took a quick glance at his wife and smiled, though he was also tapping his foot against the leg of the table and holding the menu too tightly. He wanted to get the night over and order, probably. A waitress walked to their table and took orders, her back visible, the apron around her waist tied into a neat knot. Aaron looked away and blinked. Two more days of interviewing, then home the next. He focused on that phrase like a mantra and drew in a sip of bourbon.  
The waitress went to another table, closer to him this time: he could see her face. There was something about the shape of her jaw and her eyes that gave him pause, a peculiar feeling like déjà vu. He’d seen her before. The framework of her face was familiar to him, the heart shape of the jaw, the way she moved her eyes to each patron. He latched on and tried to remember cases he’d had in this area of Pennsylvania. Nothing came up. She was five or ten years too young to have gone to high school with he and Haley, so who was she? He prided himself on being good with faces. He searched for a name tag on her and couldn’t find one.  
Aaron took another sip. This would nag at him if he didn’t find out. He swirled his glass and downed the remaining tablespoon, relishing the burn. He sat and fiddled with his phone, paid the bartender.  
After handing a table their food, she leaned over another table and cleaned it. Aaron pocketed his phone.  
“Excuse me,” he said. Her muscles tensed, a big jump trained into a slight startle. She was on edge. She looked up and he felt like her name, or at least how they had met, was on the tip of his tongue. “I think I may know you,” he said.  
“I—I think so too.” She held up a finger and darted away, to an older woman also taking orders. She talked with her hands, Aaron noticed. The older woman glanced at Aaron, looked back at her and nodded.  
The familiar woman dodged waitstaff and talked to the family waiting for their food.  
“I’ll be right back,” she said, “and that woman there with the brown hair will be bringing you your food. She’s the owner, she’ll take care of you.” The woman walked back towards him.  
“Can we speak in private?” she asked. She was twirling a strand of hair with her index finger. When he nodded and said ‘sure’ she took that finger and hooked it into a ‘follow me’ gesture. He tailed her into a large empty banquet room. She walked in, closed the door behind him, and turned to him.  
“You’re with the FBI, aren’t you?”  
He nodded. “That’s right. Agent Hotchner.”  
“Christ, I’m amazed you recognized me. It’s been so long.” She held her hand out. “Amelia Harper. From the Doughtery case. Your first name is Aaron, right?” She smiled and glanced down humbly, as if she was admitting her jam won a blue ribbon in the county fair instead of identifying herself as a victim Aaron still thought about on occasion.  
Aaron couldn’t say anything. His hand found hers somehow but he found it difficult to maneuver the fingers into a grasp, like the wiring in his arm was faulty. His eyes zeroed in on the faint outline of a scar just behind her ear. Dear god, it _was_ her.  
“I imagine it’s hard to believe,” she said. Aaron nodded. It struck him distantly that he was supposed to be saying that, to be the one acknowledging the loss and the time. The victim becomes the comforter, the profiler the profiled. Poetic. She’d had practice.  
He was still holding her hand. He let it slid out.  
“How are you, ah, doing?” he asked. He squared his shoulders.  
“Better than I was,” she said. She leaned in. “Hey, listen—I’ve got to work the rest of my shift and I’m assuming you aren’t visiting beautiful Lewisburg for pleasure, so can we meet tomorrow night? I’ve always wanted to talk to someone who was involved.”  
“Yeah, that, uh—that would be fine. Here?”  
“No, if you don’t mind. Eight hours in here and I’m usually a bit done with the place. I was thinking something different. You’re staying at the place down the street?” She gestured towards the Marriot.  
“Yes.”  
“Okay. My apartment is two blocks away. Would that be okay?”  
“Sure,” he said. He was making a stupid decision. She was a victim. He tried to think how much he’d had to drink. Not much, hardly anything. That left blind stupidity or paternal concern, and he wasn’t sure what was worse.  
“Here’s the address,” she said. Her handwriting was messy but legible. When she handed it to him her long sleeve moved up to reveal the ghost of another burn. His jaw clenched.  
“I get off at eight, any time after that would be fine.” She smiled. “You don’t get to decide when you get off.”  
“I’ll, ah, I’ll try not to keep you waiting.”  
Her hands dismissed him. “I’m not exactly the best at getting to bed early, don’t worry.”  
“I’ll be there.”  
“Great.” She grabbed his hand. “And thank you, for everything.”


	3. Chapter 3

Sitting in his hotel room, Aaron stared at the clock. Jessica sent him a text thirty minutes earlier, detailing Jack’s day at school. He pulled a classmate’s hair during lunch and got three stars taken away from his good behavior chart, which Jack wasn’t happy with. Aaron talked to him on the phone, told him not to do it again. They made a plan on how to get the stars back. Jack said he missed him. Aaron said ‘me too’. They told each other goodnight. He’d be back with Jack the day after tomorrow, he told himself. Just two days.

It was nine o’clock on the dot, and heavy rain beat against his hotel window with the changing wind. He was procrastinating, fiddling with his coat, checking his phone too much. It was time to bite the bullet, he decided, and go. He didn’t know why he had even agreed to this. She was a victim who survived. He carried her out. She wanted closure, that was all. A tiny voice in the back of his head told him that it wasn’t all. Aaron wanted closure too, stupidly enough. He sighed and walked to the door. Time to do this, get it over, and get home.

 

Aaron stood on the porch of her triplex and rapped three times on the door, curtly. This is business, he told himself. Business and nothing else. He heard footsteps, a descending cacophony of locks being undone, deadbolts unbolted and chains disconnected. Finally, it opened.

Amelia’s hair was damp. She smiled softly, looked down and invited him in. It was a neat apartment, small dining room leading in to a kitchen with vintage Jell-o molds on the walls and ruffled curtains. If Garcia had taste, this is the kind of place she would live in. She ushered him in and took his umbrella.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked. Aaron nodded, realizing that the last thing he drank was the bourbon last night. She opened a cupboard with tea boxes neatly stacked on one side and nearly untouched bottles of liquor on the other. “Water, too. And Kool-Aid, if it’s your thing.”

“Water would be fine, thanks.” He stood and held his hands in front of him. He had the feeling that he was too big for the room, something he hadn’t felt since he was a gangly teenager. It was as if the little kitchen was getting progressively smaller with each breath and he was stuck inside of it, oddly contrasting with the muted pastels and smooth curtains.

“Here,” she said. She sat on one end of the table and fiddled with the ring on her index finger. He sat across from her.

“What did you want to talk about?” he asked. He put on his sympathetic talk-to-victims face, tilted his head one way.

She sat back and drew her mug of tea to her lips. “What it was like,” she said, “to find me. What I was like.”

“May I ask why?” Aaron said. He sipped the water.

“I’ve been in therapy twice a week for five years, I’ve been on medications from Ambien to Zoloft, I see scars on my body that I can’t remember getting. I know what happened to me generally, but I can’t remember everything like I need to.”

He tilted his head. “So you want to know what it looked like when we found you?”

She nodded. “I remember the middle, while I was with him. How I got there and when I got out is fuzzy for me. My therapist and psychiatrist thought it would be good to know—more to understand what I’ve overcome than anything.”

“They think this is a good idea?”

“They approve when I bring it up. I started looking in to it years ago but it was so clinical, the medical report said what I expected and I remember being in the hospital. I need to remember what it was like to be freed. It’s like it’s on the tip of my tongue but I can’t say it. It’s maddening.”

Aaron leaned back in his chair. “This isn’t conventionally something I do in my job at the BAU.”

“I know. If you don’t remember or don’t want to, so be it. I’ll say goodbye and be as appreciative as if you did. It’s a favor for someone you’ve already given everything to.” She leaned forward in her chair and stirred her tea with a small spoon. “I’m told all the time how inspiring I am, how I persevered, how I recovered. I don’t know how bad it really was. I don’t have any yardstick for how true those statements really are.” She stood up. “More water?”

His lips pursed and he nodded.

She tossed the teabag into a small ceramic container—no doubt compost, something that Reid had spoke of more than once. She washed the mug, dried it with an embroidered tea towel and hung it from a hook on the wall. She refilled his glass with water.

“The living room is more comfortable for speaking,” she said.

She sat on a small loveseat in the corner, he on the couch. She had a fire going, and for a moment he wanted only to bask in the warmth of it, to avoid thinking about why he was doing this.

As much as he tried, he wasn’t able to compartmentalize this case. It had stuck with him, despite everything else he’d seen.

“Okay,” he said, and then he began.


	4. Chapter 4

Usually when Aaron thought about the victims from a case long after it was over, it was because they’d been too late. The pictures that remained there in his mind like a retinal burn, unable to be blinked away in the dark, were clinical morgue photos and the eternally smiling faces of missing children. This time, it was a living, breathing person.

The house looked normal from the outside. A colonial-styled home, probably built in the early 1900s, restored beautifully. He and Haley had looked at seven houses just like it when they were first looking. There wasn’t a single cobweb on the exterior. The paint wasn’t mildewed or peeling, and the grounds were tastefully decorated with Japanese maples and cobblestone. Inside, everything was as modern as Aaron’s own dwelling. The kitchen gleamed in chrome. Everything was neat, organized. The silverware was polished in the kitchen drawers. The shower stall’s glass held no residue.

The master bedroom was the last room they’d entered, and once the chorus of ‘CLEAR’s was over the team holstered their weapons. This was the only messy room. Their unsub had left quickly, grabbing only the essentials and throwing them in one of the suitcases that was missing from its slot in the closet. The bed was slept in, the remote to the flatscreen TV hanging across from it placed on the nightstand. Morgan picked the remote up and turned the TV on.

And there she was, brightening as the monitor woke.

She was nodding off, it seemed, trying to sit upright and failing. She was completely nude. Everything was muted dark shades of green except for her eyes, which glittered neon in their sockets. She was alive. That was all that mattered. They all ran from the room, guns out again, hunting for the entrance. It was dark down there. There had to be a basement. Reid found the entrance in the back of the pantry and they’d all gone down, one after the other, flashlights bouncing against the walls.

It was a cement hallway with shelving, twenty feet or so long. Their flashlights illuminated everything heated; curling irons, pokers, cigarette lighters, Morley Slims, hot plates, beakers of water, lighters, steam irons and branding tools. They could hear her making keening noises, mewling gasps and measured screams. They kept saying her name.

“Amelia?”

“Amelia!”

“Amelia..?”

The door was metal. It must have weighed three hundred pounds. It was sealed with rubber on the edges, designed to reduce noise and light as much as possible. They opened it slowly.

She was on the floor screeching her own name. Someone behind him still had their flashlight on. In the few seconds that it took that person to turn it off, Aaron saw something he couldn’t ever forget.

She was skeletal. Her breasts were flattened and deflated against her chest. He could count each rib. She was laying on her side on the concrete floor. Her hip jutted out like a cliff from her abdomen, the skin beneath it clinging to its contours. His mind, even with all its training in compartmentalization and its experience with the difficult to comprehend, couldn’t make sense of it. _She should be dead._

There was her skin, too. Pale as the moon with dark cratered scars. Blood all over her thighs, coming out of sores that looked to have split. He swore he saw Morgan crossing himself in the corner of his eye. And then it all went dark again.

She was still saying her name. Aaron got on all fours and crawled towards her, telling her who he was, what he was doing. He touched her with his hand and she stopped moving. He smelled her breath, sweetly rotten. Her hand reached for his suit and rubbed it. He told her it was going to be okay. He took off his coat and laid it over her and then he gathered her in his arms. She was light and unyielding. At the end of the hallway, as his eyes were getting accustomed to the semi-dark, Reid placed his own scarf over her eyes. To protect them.

Outside it was chilled, the end of September. The bite of fall had begun. They walked single file down the path to the waiting ambulance. Gideon was first, beckoning the EMTs and their gurney to the end of the gravel. Then Amelia and Aaron, everyone else following. Some neighbors had come out to stare and glare. The EMTs laid her out neatly on the gurney and spoke to her, telling her what they were doing. They lifted her into the ambulance and he yelled out some instructions—she hasn’t been exposed to light in months, she has extensive burns, she is disoriented and may become violent. The EMTs spoke to her now, replacing the soothing words Aaron had been saying with their own. She kept saying no to their questions: no, she wasn’t in pain. No, she wasn’t allergic to any medications. She was getting louder and louder, trying to fight them off as they got the IV in, slapping their trained hands away. As he got farther away, she became more frantic. He held eye contact with Gideon, then stepped in to the ambulance again.

“It’s going to be alright,” he said. “I’ll go with you. My name is Aaron, you’re going to be fine.”


	5. Chapter 5

She got up to stroke the fire, crouching in front of it and stirring the coals with the iron rod. Her sleeves were rolled up and he could see the scars, smooth and shiny marks that gleamed with the fire’s glow. It was ten thirty.

“Can you remember anything else?” She turned back to him, exposing another scar under her collar. “I want to know everything.”

He closed his eyes. “When I first touched you, I remember hearing you open your mouth. I think you were trying to say something, but I can’t remember hearing you say it.”

She laughed once, a harsh exhalation with venom in it like a cat’s hiss.

“I doubt I was saying anything, unfortunately,” she said. She sat back down in her spot and drew her legs to her chest. “I was probably opening my mouth for other reasons.” She stared at the ceiling and breathed. “He made me perform on him. I was confused. Presumably, I thought you were him.” She looked at him and shrugged.

“You never told us this in the interview.”

“I know.”

He laced his fingers together. “He never said anything about it during his interviews either.”

“Makes sense. He had this kind of... ashamed look to him when he made me do it. He got angry afterwards and either left me without food for a day or hurt me. It depended on his mood, I suppose. When I was in the hospital it was too hard to talk about. I didn’t see how it mattered in the grand scope of things,” here she gestured to her body, “so I kept quiet.”

“And he did too,” he said.

She resettled her body on the couch.

“One more question,” she said.

He dipped his head towards her.

“Do you remember all your cases this well?”

The fire crackled and the log lit all at once.

“Truthfully?”

She nodded “I never ask for lies.”

“No. I remember this one. I wouldn’t have agreed to meet with you if I didn’t still think about the case.” Aaron caught himself distancing the case from her. It was _the_ case, not _her_ case or even—to be entirely plain with himself—just _her_. “It was a long two weeks of trying to track him down. When he fled, it became a lot simpler. Just trying to find you. We focused, we found the house. We didn’t expect to find you alive, but you were. And you are.” He smiled.

“Scarred, starving, malnourished, naked, burned and covered in grime but alive.”

He stood. It was getting late, he needed to get back into the room and prepare for tomorrow.

“What about your coat? What happened to it?”

Was she stalling?

“It got lost in the commotion, I guess.”

She stood up.

“I can make it up to you,” she said. “Tomorrow’s my day off and I usually cook for myself and I was planning to have pesto pasta for dinner and sorbet for dessert. You could come. I don’t know how else to thank you.”

He stood and thought. He could see Straus’s face if she ever heard about this. He couldn’t think about it. All he thought about was that dinner sounded great and company better. He nodded. “Same time?”

She smiled and agreed. “See you then, come hungry.”

And Aaron walked out into the rain.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There aren't /graphic/ scenes of abuse in here, but she does get in to discussing some more sexual stuff. I'd say that if you're triggered by sexual abuse, you may want to skip this chapter. Take care of yourself and if later you're confused message me.
> 
> Also: just my luck that this Gibson drama happens while I'm writing my first ever published fic. 
> 
> And thanks to the amazing reader who informed me ever so gently that my chapters were messed up! My bad.

“The only good thing about interviewing this sonovvabitch is getting off early,” Morgan said. They were driving back to the hotel from the prison. They were done with Richards now. Tomorrow he was being put to death. “Showtime, HBO, room service… Marriot is the way to go.”

Aaron nodded, pulling into a space.

“Tonight I wanna get out though. You up for a beer? This place’s selection is baaaad.”

Aaron grinned. “I’ve got other plans, sorry.”

Morgan’s eyebrows rose as he got out of the car. “Other plans?”

“I’m meeting an old friend for dinner,” he said.

Morgan’s face broke into a smile. “Oh, is that where you were last night, or was there another reason for you to be walking in from the rain that late?”

“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “I do know what channels we have, though, and when I walked past your room on my way out I could distinctly hear some that weren’t HBO, Showtime, Starz or even Cinemax.”

Morgan closed his mouth. “Point taken.”

“Good.”

They stepped into the elevator together and didn’t say anything until they reached Morgan’s room.

“See you at eight am, _bright_ and _shiny_ ,” Morgan said.

Aaron turned and chucked a balled-up page from his notepad at Morgan. It bounced off the now-closed door harmlessly and came to rest at his feet. Morgan’s laugh rang out into the hallway as Aaron leaned down to pick it up.

He has no idea, he thought.

 

“Hey, come on in.” She opened the door and ushered him in. The house smelled sweet and spicy, garlic mixing with basil and cheese.

“The pasta’s ready, you’re right on time.” She told him to sit at either seat. “Do you want water again or would you rather have something else? I’ve got tea, coffee, milk, and three types of Kool-Aid. Oh, alcohol too.”

“Water would be fine,” he said. It occurred to him once more that this was an odd thing to be doing, eating dinner with a victim. He shook his head and blinked his eyes. She’d set the table properly, from silverware and china to pillar candles in brass holders.

“Believe it or not, I do this every Friday night,” she said. “I make myself a nice romantic dinner for one, settle in with dessert and a movie and freeze the leftovers. Then when I come home from a terrible Tuesday all I have to do is reheat and shove the food in my mouth. It’s like a gift.”

She served him his pasta first, then brought in her own. There was already grated parmesan on the table along with salt, pepper, and a small bottle of olive oil. She sat down with a glass of water—why the Kool-Aid, he wondered, if she didn’t seem to drink it?—and lit the candles.

“So am I allowed to ask about you or are there rules?” she said, digging in with her fork and spoon.

“What do you want to know?” Rules? What was she talking about?

“I don’t know. What it’s like to do what you do for a living.”

He thought. “I like helping people and helping people is the end product of my job,” here ‘Haley’ bubbled up through his thoughts like lumps in curdled milk and he had to pause for breath. “It’s not an easy job but I love it.”

“Are you here talking to Richards?”

“Yes, we are.”

“How is he?”

Aaron chewed. “Scared,” he said. “This is excellent, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she said. “It’s an old family recipe going back centuries.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Really?”

“No, I tore it out of an issue of Woman’s Day in my shrink’s waiting room six months ago. She didn’t say anything, but I think she knows.”

He laughed. “She helps?”

“Yeah. I’ve been seeing her since I moved here two years ago. She used to work at the VA and had a few former POWs and hostages under her belt. I’m a charity case since she’s in semi-retirement. It works well.”

“What else helps? It’s unusual to see someone so, for lack of a better word, okay after what you’ve been through.” He looked down at his almost empty plate. How long had he been here?

She scraped the last bite off of her plate and chewed it. When she swallowed—one of the scars on her throat dipping down and bouncing back up—she spoke.

“It hasn’t always been like this,” she said. She gathered her plate and leaned forward for his. Her hair fell forward, hiding her face from him. It seemed like beneath the sheet of waves her facial expression could have been anything, from joy to despair. When she straightened out, Aaron saw her lips upturned but barely, her eyes downturned and solemn. He recognized the emotion but couldn’t find the word for it. “For the first year I couldn’t work. I lived right next door to my parents, in that little rental. I was on seven different psych pills every day. I couldn’t get a full night’s sleep.” She set the dishes in the sink and put on a pair of pink rubber gloves. While she dropped dish soap onto a sponge, he blew out the candles and stood beside her, ready to rinse. She smiled and thanked him. “My partner at the time, Mark, left me within months. I didn’t want him to see me with the lights on. I wasn’t capable of sleeping near him and my need for constant light bothered him at night.” She handed him a plate, began work on the pasta pot. “One night we were talking. We couldn’t argue, I would dissolve when he raised his voice at me. We were just sitting in my old apartment and talking just like you and I are now, with the same tone of voice, and he told me that I wasn’t the same. I said I was sorry but there was nothing I could do about what had happened to me and its effect. He told me I was milking it. I was speechless. I just sat there trying not to cry and finally I lifted my shirt and showed him the scars. He’d only seen my torso a few times, and even then it was in shadow. So he looked at my body and he started shaking and I told him to get his stuff and get out. And he did.”

Aaron took the pot and rinsed it.

“We interviewed him,” he said. It was Morgan and Reid, tasked with victimology. Mark was the last to see her before she was abducted. “He was a mess.”

“Good,” she said. She went to the table to get their glasses. “After the first year I was put on different medications. I took some online classes and finished my AA. I started driving again. Everyone in Emory wanted me to work for them. I became a local celebrity, every little mom-n-pop wanted the girl who survived behind their counters. I ended up volunteering with the animal shelter. I walked dogs. They didn’t give a shit who I was.” She washed the bowl that held the parmesan. “It was impossible to heal in Emory. Everyone wanted to help, everyone thought of me as this entity who needed to be respected and coddled. It was like I was an urban legend and if people didn’t make every effort to accommodate me and respect me and ask me all these little how-are-you-doing questions something terrible was going to happen to them. I moved out two years back to live with my aunt here and since then it’s been much easier.”

“I’m glad,” he said. He wanted to ask her more questions, ostensibly to catalogue her answers away for future use at work. Were he to be honest with himself he would admit that he still didn’t understand. After all that, something as simple as moving away couldn’t have healed her like she seemed to be healed. There had to be something more. He put the bowl on the rack to dry. She reached for the freezer.

“I picked five gallons of blackberries last summer and turned most of them into this sorbet,” she said, holding out a Tupperware container, “you interested?”

“Sure,” he said.

She scooped them both two bowls. In the light of the living room, the sorbet looked nearly sickening, so purple it was almost black; the color of fresh bruises and burnt flesh. He closed his eyes and put a spoonful in his mouth. It tasted like childhood.

“So the move really helped you,” he said.

“In some ways. It was a combination of having a clean slate, my aunt’s support and meeting new communities that really changed things.”

“What kind of communities?” The sorbet got more delicious with each taste. Aaron made a silent promise to Jack that they would go blackberry picking this summer, somehow.

She was sitting on one end of the couch, facing him. He was on the other, both feet on the ground, leaning over his bowl and turning his head to look at her. She looked into her sorbet. The sides of her mouth crinkled and turned up. She tucked her feet beneath her.

“They’re pretty fringe, are you sure you want to know?”

He stopped, blinked. Fringe? _Please don’t let her be a cultist_ , he thought. _Please_.

“If it helped you, I’m interested.”

She inhaled deeply and held it.

“At first, I moved in with my aunt. I slept on her couch until I had enough saved up for a deposit on an apartment. She was always insisting that I get out and have fun on the weekends.” She scoffed. “This was back when I had weekends.

“Anyway, I started driving to Pittsburgh every weekend to rent a library book and read it at some little coffee shop. My favorite coffee place had this big cork board by the bathrooms with all sorts of community posts on it. Things like job openings, business cards from starving artists, dogsitting, and meetings of various clubs. I looked at it one afternoon and saw this club about healing from sexual abuse. I still hadn’t really told my therapist about the sexual stuff. I could tell that it changed that part of me, so I decided to go to one of the meetings.”

She glanced at him and raised her eyebrows. He nodded.

“I went to this meeting in the basement of a sex shop. I was really nervous. It seemed like it could be a scam. I bought pepper spray from a hunting store on my way down to Philly that day.

“There were about ten people there, including a sex therapist and one of the baristas at the café. We went around in a circle and shared what we wanted to share about our histories. One guy had been raped by his girlfriend, two women were date raped by men, there was childhood sex abuse, it was pretty much what you’d expect. And then it came to me, and I didn’t know what to say but I was still so nervous so I just said everything. Including the sexual stuff. And they all listened and then one woman asked me if it was okay if she hugged me and I said yes and she just let me cry on her. I wasn’t nervous anymore. It was out, out in the open, and I felt so much better.”

Amelia pushed her hair back.

“When I was done crying, they told me how brave I was for telling them and they thanked me for sharing with them. And then,” here she smiled, her eyes glistening, “and then they told me their stories of how the group had helped them. And I decided to do it, just like that.”

She sniffed.

“Basically what they all did was controlled reinactments of the abuse. One woman talked about how her male partner would pretend to rape her, and how the emotions would come out of her, and when she got overwhelmed she could just say one word and he’d stop. And then he’d take care of her, give her a bath and a massage, get her in her favorite pajamas and play her favorite music until she fell asleep. Each time she got more sensitized to it. She got more control. When her body reacted or she flashed back to it, it was over and she was surrounded by love. She said it made all the difference in the world. It sounded like it could work, but I told them I didn’t have a partner. One man in the group said he’d work with me if I trusted him. We talked after the meeting and decided to meet the next weekend to see if we were a good fit. It was, and then I was going down there every other weekend for a session with him. And then, miraculously, it started to feel better.”

Aaron sat. In his peripheral he saw that she was glancing at him from beneath her eyelashes and hair. He kept his face concerned and blank and looked at her, straight on. “How did you reenact the burns?”

She was relieved—her temples went slack and she stopped biting at the inside of her lip. “We started with spoons heated in warm water, and as I got more comfortable we went with hot stones, then dripping wax.”

“Wouldn’t wax burn you?”

“No, we used the cosmetic wax that they use for hair removal at beauty parlors. It melts at a lower temperature, so beyond a little bit of redness there’s no damage.”

“It makes a lot of sense,” he said. “it’s like the progressive desensitization used to treat phobias. You’d start an arachnophobic patient out just looking at pictures of spiders and gradually work up to actually touching or holding spiders, until the fear is neutralized. It’s basically cognitive behavioral therapy.”

“It’s changed my life,” she said.

“I’m glad.” He checked his watch and jumped. It was eleven o’clock.

“And now you have to go,” she said. He nodded.

“I’ve got to be back at Quantico in less than twelve hours,” he said.

She stood up and took his bowl. He heard them tinkle in the kitchen sink as he stood to grab his coat.

“Hey, thanks. It’s been nice to have someone over for once. I hope my pilfered recipe made up for some small part of what you did for me five years ago.”

He smiled. “It did, everything was great.” He slipped his arms into the holes and checked his pockets. He had his phone, keys, everything. She stepped forward. He could smell her perfume, something clean and floral and soaplike.

“If you’re ever in town or just want some conversation,” she said. She took his hand and folded it around a slip of paper. He nodded.

“Thanks for everything,” he said. He opened the door. She turned on the porch light for him and leaned against the doorframe, waving as he drove away.


	7. Chapter 7

Three weeks to the day after he left Amelia’s little house in the rainy dark, Aaron entered a gas station an hour out of town. He was taking Jack out on a weekend drive and needed to buy water for the ride home. As Aaron was standing in the fluorescent light with two cold bottles in his hands, guiding Jack away from the candy aisle, he saw them.

Prepaid cell phones. All just sitting there in their blister packs as the constant beep-boop of the cash register played in the background.

Jack reached for one of the colorful iPhone chargers in front of them, asking all the while what they were and if he could have one, and Aaron reached to grab a phone off the wall.

“They charge phones, buddy,” Aaron said, “just like mine in the car, only more colorful.”

He smiled at the girl behind the counter as she rung them up.

“That’ll be eighty-four ninety six,” she said.

He had his fingers on his debit card but went with a hundred dollar bill instead.

 

That night at ten, Aaron looked away from the stack of case files on the coffee table in the living room to the bag from the gas station. It had cheery smiley faces interspersed with massive black impact font: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. He reached for the bag and brought it with him into the generally unused kitchen. Somewhere in these drawers that Prentiss and Rossi had stocked for him was a pair of kitchen scissors. He opened one drawer, finding it full of knives. He noted that he needed to get some kind of a child lock on that one and went on. The next drawer was cutlery, and even behind the tray that held all the forks, spoons and knives he couldn’t find that pair of scissors. There were spatulas in the next drawer, which he’d only ever used once to scrape yogurt out of a nearly empty container for Jack’s school lunch. The next drawer was nearly entirely full of various flotsam and jetsam. Rubber bands, bread clips, a broken can opener, Aaron’s first driver’s license, twist ties, pipe cleaners, an ‘I voted’ sticker with lint sticking to the adhesive on the back, paper clips and the bent souvenir spoon Haley had picked up on the way to the Niagra Falls on a road trip they took a year into their marriage. Aaron bit his lip. The next drawer held a working can opener, wine cork, bottle opener and rubber gripping pad to open stuck jars. Aaron fished his hand around the back until finally—finally!—he felt the handle of the scissors. He cut it open, shallowly sliced his thumb with the cut plastic, sucked it and read the instructions on activating the phone. After all that was done, he sat back down on the couch. He unfolded her number and smoothed it out on the table until it laid flat.

In the three weeks since meeting her, the team had done three consults and driven to Tennessee to investigate a serious of failed attempts to set strip clubs on fire. His sleeping schedule had been ruinous, as per the usual, but when he was able to sleep deep enough to dream he woke feeling like he was dreaming about her. It was odd. Usually, Aaron didn’t remember his dreams. On rare occasions—like the dreams where he was back with Haley and she was pregnant and everything was just as it should be—he woke remembering what he had dreamed. Those were all concrete. In the logic of the dream, Haley was a concrete object, something he could touch. So was Foyet’s flesh, the crunch of bone and the smell of cedar, but those dreams he didn’t like to think about.

These dreams were different.

When he woke up in his hotel room, he remembered faint images. One night he was dimly aware he had dreamed of a tree with blossoms. It wasn’t the tree that had reminded him of Amelia, or even the blossoms: it was the way the blossoms tumbled as they fell. Another flash was a man sitting at a table. The manner in which he checked his watch, the fluidity of the movements, made Aaron think not of any man he knew but of Amelia. They jarred him. As he shaved in the morning or neatened his tie, as he watched Morgan tuck the unsub’s head into the squad car, he tried to forget the images, the dreams, even Amelia herself. He couldn’t.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. This was a mistake. All of this. Buying a burner cell, like he was guilty of a crime before even committing it. Allowing himself to think about her. Agreeing to not one but two dinners with a victim. Asking her how he knew her. Needing to drink bourbon instead of hotel whiskey. Everything.

Here was the problem: he knew it was a mistake and he didn’t care.

He’d been a planner all his life. He knew he would follow in his father’s footsteps when he was a twelve-year-old boy, and he planned. He saw Haley for the first time and he planned. He went to college planning a career. They wanted a home and they planned. They wanted a child and they planned. Everything measured out, every risk examined. He could never have guessed how everything turned out, but at the very least he could say he picked the smartest choice at that moment. This time, he didn’t know what was in store for him and he didn’t care. He was going to go for this, and there was no telling where he would end up.

The only thing he knew was that she liked him and he hated himself for liking her, too. The image of her leaning forward and pressing her number into his palm swam in front of his eyes. He squeezed them shut and shook his head.

He took in a long breath and then, slowly, he dialed her number.


	8. Chapter 8

“Yeah?”

She sounded completely different on the phone; the sparkle in her voice was gone, the inflection flattened.

“Is this Amelia?”

There was a pause.

“Yes this is Amelia, can I ask who’s speaking?”

“It’s Aaron Hotchner, from the BAU. We met up a few weeks ago,” he said. He picked one of Jack’s toys off the coffee table and held it in his other hand. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I came home to a burst pipe in the kitchen, fixing it is a huge pain in the ass, but I’m fine. You sounded like a telemarketer.”

Aaron ran Jack’s toy truck along the couch cushion. “Oh, should I call back?”

“No!” she yelled. “Uh, no. I need a break anyways. This will help.” He heard rustling. “What’s on your mind?”

He swallowed, probably loudly. His heart beat and heat gathered high in his cheeks. How was he supposed to say this? _Screw it, be bold._

“I’ve been thinking about our dinner a lot and I want to see you again,” he said.

“Oh, lovely! Sure, are you coming back into town?” he heard rubber boots squeaking in the background.

“No,” he said. He ran his index over the truck’s tire, sent it spinning with a flick. “This would be more of a day trip.”

“Okay then. We could meet halfway,” she said. “Take in the sights at Gettysburg?”

He was running the toy truck up his leg now, the bearings on it squeaking. He had his ankle resting on the opposite knee and was jiggling it up and down like a schoolboy. Playing tourist would certainly be a good cover, but it was too easy to discern where they might go.

“It has to be a bit more…” he said. More what? Private? He felt like some archetypal creeper, the kind he’d profiled dozens of times, preying on a young girl. But she wasn’t a young girl. _She’s thirty. Thirty two._ Last week he had stayed late one night and read her file. Gideon’s notes, notes on victimology, on Doughtery, everything. “Surreptitious.”

He heard her typing rapidly on keys.

“Understood. Somewhere off the beaten path?”

“Definitely.”

“Per Google, there’s a small-town greasy spoon out in the boonies past Gettysburg. It’s on 116, ten miles off of 15. Two Yelp reviews,” a pause, then a change in tone: “’decent I guess’ and ‘fine in a pinch’.”

“Perfect,” he said. He had to think like Garcia. He needed everything to be untraceable, for Amelia’s sake and Amelia’s sake only. He’d be surprised if a diner in that part of Pennsylvania had a working credit card reader, nonetheless security cameras.

“Saturday?” she asked.

He thought. “Sure.”

“Five?”

Five o’clock would be busy, wouldn’t it? Aaron tried to think like Reid. He swore that once, on a case in Arkansas, Reid said something about farmers and regular mealtimes. Or was it about Circadian rhythms? He had no idea. He’d go with his gut.

“No, two would be better. Get there a little bit late. You’ll find me.”

“Sounds like a date.”

“Call it what you will,” he said. “But I’ll be there.”

“Me too,” he heard more footsteps on her line. “Shit.”

“I think that’s my cue to leave,” he said. He couldn’t help it, he was smiling.

“Yes, it is. My landlord’s just made a surprise visit. Twenty-four hour notice, my ass. I’ve got to go but listen: thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” she said. He heard clattering, quick steps.

“See you then,” he said.

She hung up. He stayed there on the couch for a long time, arms crossed behind his head, before retiring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little FYI:  
> I start a new semester of college next week so the vast majority of my brain power for the next little while will be going directly to navigating the hell that is textbook shopping and school in general.  
> Since I guess people like this and I'm having a fun time writing it, I'll try to keep updating but if I'm slow please forgive me!  
> And I'm still really bummed about the Thomas Gibson thing, so that's slowing me down a bit too. Forgive me, pretty please!
> 
> I'm doing this to improve, and here are some things I think I have been slacking on:  
> -Hotch's character. I've written further than this by quite a few thousand words so I'm getting him pinned down more, but I don't think I'm doing a very good job with him. He feels flat to me, but this is my first time getting deep into another person's character.  
> -Word choice and sentence variety. It's always bothered me that sometimes I write very plainly. Sentences like this. Just fragments with no punctuation. I'm not the best at finding the exact correct word I need so I use words again and again, and that irritates me too.  
> -Behavior. Is it realistic for Hotch to do this? What about someone like Amelia? Is it logical or emotional? How? I just keep asking myself these questions.  
> But maybe I'm just being weird and these aren't noticeable to other people? I hope???


	9. Chapter 9

The rain fell onto her car’s roof. She sat behind the driver’s seat, he the passenger’s. Everything outside was marbled due to the rain falling in a sheet down the windows. Surplus light from the diner’s neon sign was smeared across the windshield. In the distance, thunder rolled.

Aaron’s assumption that the place would be empty at just after two was wrong. This was a highly popular establishment with a surprising clientele. Men in dress shirts leaned over booths towards women embroidered with jewels. On nearly every man’s left hand was a smooth, pale, ghostlike line where a wedding ring should be. At the entrance and exit, a line of beautiful ladies with lacquered nails winked at retreating men. He was right about two things: there were not visible security cameras and everything was cash-only. Prices were high. She had a muffin and a small tea, he some coffee and a scone. They decided to sit in her car, as it was far too busy in the café and the backseat of Aaron’s car was filled with soccer equipment Jack had outgrown.

“I didn’t know you had a kid,” she said.

“It didn’t come up.”

“Hmm.” He caught her eyes flitting to his own left hand. “I swear I didn’t know what this place was.”

“Me either,” he said. He was wearing a polo shirt, windbreaker, jeans and hiking boots. His hair was ungelled and he had a pair of sunglasses, the ultimate in conspicuous attempts at inconspicuousness, in his pocket. She’d found him leaning against the wall under the leaking awning. She agreed to do the order and let him into her car to wait. It was neat inside, a ten-year-old Subaru with leather seats and a moon roof. She kept the heat on for him, asked if he wanted the radio.

“Here’s a question for you:” he said, “were they congressmen or representatives?”

“You could tell that?” Her eyebrows rose. Her hair dripped onto the leather. She had been outside for less than a minute and she was soaked. He nodded.

“Reps?”

“Wrong. They’re lobbyists.”

She turned her entire torso towards him. “You don’t know that.”

He said nothing, just smiled.

“How do you know?”

Her hand was on her hip now, her eyes squinted. He’d touched a nerve.

“I have my ways.”

She tucked back into her muffin and was silent.

“You look so normal today,” she said, as if it was an accusation. He looked at her and she blanched. “The suit and tie, with your hair and everything.” Her brows were knitted together over her eyes in a wide U. “I just mean that—“

“No, I get it,” he smiled, “and to be honest I sometimes feel the same way.”

“I mean, don’t you get nervous without your gun and all that? You practically live with it on, don’t you?”

“No, sometimes it’s nice to be unarmed,” he lied. She didn’t need to know about _that_ gun. “Though being in plain clothes can be freeing, like I’m not playing a part.” He remembered a case three years back in which he and Reid interviewed a witness to a kidnapping. The witness had a service dog, and as they’d walked away Reid prattled on about how important the vest was to the dog and trainer: when the vest was off, the dog knew it could act like a dog, and when the vest came on the dog knew it was working. “In the suit you have a certain mindset. Taking it off signals that you’re off work and you can be more…” Honest? True? Real? “casual.”

“Try being a waitress,” she said. “Same thing.”

“I would but I don’t think I could pull off the apron.” She reached over and slapped his shoulder. He finished his scone and sipped coffee.

Through the waterglazed glass they watched a man exit the café with a woman on his arm. They stepped into a Porsche parked along the highway in front of Amelia’s car. The woman had a high, tinkling laugh. Aaron squinted, trying to find a license plate number. Just in case.

“Can I ask you something?” Her voice was melodious, too singsong: she was faking casualty.

“Of course.” He folded his napkin into a square and stuffed it into the paper bag they used for trash.

“Why are you so cautious about this?” she gestured to the air between them. “I know that what we’re doing isn’t looked upon kindly by your boss and his boss and his boss after that, but we’re going overboard here. You wouldn’t even look in the windows without sunglasses on and the sun isn’t anywhere near here today.”

“I can never be too careful.”

“Yeah, but look at all of them. Neither can they, and yet they seem to be doing just fine.”

He clasped his hands together.

“Did I tell you how long it took us to hunt Doughtery’s house down?”

“I—no, but—“

“We searched for a week,” he said. “Nine days.” She recoiled slightly and he paused, reassuring her with his eyes. “He had basically made himself untraceable. He had everything under stolen identities’ names. It was a team effort. The only reason we can talk right now is because of my team, Amelia. We all have skills at the BAU. I work with a certifiable genius with an incredible memory; the top profiler in the country if not the world; an expert technical analyst and computer hacker who can find anything out about anyone; a highly driven agent who had to learn human behavior the hard way, a former Interpol agent who is the most determined person I’ve ever met; and a public relations specialist that holds us all together. I know they already suspect I’m seeing somebody and I know they’ll try their hardest to find out who she is.” At the words ‘seeing somebody,’ Amelia’s eyes widened and brightened. She had her hand over her mouth, hiding a smile. “We hunt down dangerous people. Just after we worked your case, we had a case that broke one of our agents. She was targeted by an unsub. It broke her and she left.” The smile had melted off her face now. He loathed to see it gone. “A year later a veteran profiler was targeted and the same thing happened: he went MIA. Within two years of saving you, of catching Doughtery, we lost two agents.” She was trying to say something now, her mouth opening, the pink tip of her tongue dancing on the edge of her teeth. He held up two fingers, leaned towards her. “I don’t want that to happen to you.”

She sat in shock, eyes wide. She looked at his hand again, scanned the still slightly pale spot where his ring used to be. She looked up at him and her mouth opened again, then back at the hand.

“Did—did someone—“

He didn’t say anything, either. Plead the fifth. He let his hand fall. He closed his eyes. He helplessly felt the heat that gathered in his cheeks, the hot tear wavering at the edge of his eye. She needed to be scared, but she didn’t need to know everything. He couldn’t go into it today.

He could feel her hand on his knee, reassuring.

Her lips were cold and smooth. At first she pecked his lips, until finally he parted them. He raised his hands to her hair, still damp from the walk to the car. She used rosemary shampoo and peppermint lip balm, cinnamon mouthwash. She smelled nothing like Haley. Haley wore Jadore perfume, MAC lipstick and rose facial cream. She tilted her head and shifted her weight to her right hip, pressing herself against him. He lowered his arm and let her lead, her hand inching its way beneath his shirt, cool against his flushed skin, her neck extended, his lips beneath her jaw. It had been so long, so so long since he’d felt this and it felt like home, it felt like he belonged. She moaned.

Her hand reached a point just below his ribcage and stopped. It went from something liquid, slithering up his skin like a cold-blooded reptile, to solid. He realized that her body was solid, the moan coming from the base of her throat changed pitch and died out. Her lips went slack, her shoulders fell. He opened his eyes and saw hers staring blankly through him.

It took a second before she started screeching.


	10. Chapter 10

In the instant that Amelia’s eyes had focused beyond his, at a point either within his skull or behind it, Aaron recalled one of his first interviews with Reid.

The unsub was a 60-year-old woman who had poisoned the local country club’s biweekly brunch with rat poison. She was a standard psychopath and it was a run-of-the-mill interview. Gideon thought it would be a good starter project for Reid, and Aaron agreed. They asked the questions they always asked and she gave them the textbook range of answers. Walking back to the team, Reid asked if Aaron had noticed her eyes. Sure, he had: she stared at them with resolve and her eyes were strikingly blue. _No_ , Reid said, _the iris_ , and when Aaron thought about it, he realized: her eyes were striking for other reasons, too. There was a gap between her iris and lower lid, so the whites of her eyes were joined together at both sides, unbroken. _The Japanese have a word for it_ , Reid had said: _sanpaku_. Supposedly, it indicated an imbalance in the spiritual or physical body. _Ted Bundy had it_ , Reid had said as they walked out of the prison. _Natalie Wood, too. And Hitler!_

Amelia’s iris was surrounded on all sides by white, like a scared horse. Her eyes clenched shut. She breathed deeply, too deeply, through her nostrils. _An imbalance_.

“Amelia?”

Her jaw quivered, lips curled into a grimace. He recoiled from her. He must have done something wrong, the ease he felt had popped like a soap bubble, it was always a mistake, he must have gone overboard, what was he thinking? He’d taken it too far.

“Amelia, I’m sorry. I can leave, I just need to know that you’re alright.”

She gasped. One hand clenched at her hair, the other hovered limp between them.

“Aaron,” she whispered. She was gasping now through her mouth. Her lip quivered. “Aaron.”

He nodded. She looked into his eyes for the first time since freezing. Tears spilled out.

“Who—who did—did?”

Her hand pointing to his ribcage, repeating a jagged U in the air.

_Oh_. It was the scar, one of the nastiest ones, not noticeable visually through his dress shirts but raised in a two-inch long line that curled like a smile beneath his ribcage.

“He’s dead now, he can’t hurt anyone ever again. Please do me a favor, Amelia, and try to breathe slow for me, okay?” He put his hands up. _I’m not going to hurt you._

“Who?” Her hand became a claw, she clamped it on his wrist. Her nails dug into his flesh. “You have to tell me, please, please tell me, oh god oh god ohgodohgod…”

“It’s okay,” he said.

She froze, shaking her head, chin wobbling. When he looked at his hand, he saw the veins popping.

“Amelia,” he whispered, “you’re hurting me.”

She gave him that wild-eyed gaze again. Her grip loosened as her face crumpled. She curled into herself and shuddered, gasping between sobs.

“The man that did this is gone. He’s gone and we’re safe.”

She was hugging herself, crying like a small girl. He touched her convex back and she fell against him.

Aaron held her like he would Jack, woken up with a nightmare. He stroked her hair, he made his breaths deep and slow. She sobbed into his shirt. Outside, rain continued to fall. He stared at the sheet of rain suspended above them. He waited, gave her all the time she needed.

When her breaths had synced with his, she uncoiled and sat against the seat. Her eyes were puffy, nose covered in snot. He retrieved the unused napkin and handed it to her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“There is nothing here that’s your fault, Amelia. I should have warned you.”

“If I hadn’t left out so much of the bad stuff weeks ago, you would have known that you needed to,” she said. She sat up straighter. “I just thought you might think I was more ready to hear all of my story—“ her breath hitched, “if I _sounded_ healed.”

“Healing is a process, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that in the course of my career. After this,” he said, pointing to the scar, “I’ve learned how hard it is to understand that. After a trauma, any trauma, no matter how small, we have to adapt.”

“It’s a day at a time,” she said.

Thinking of Reid and the big blue book he carried in his bag wherever he went, Aaron nodded. “Exactly.”

In front of them, the woman exited the Porsche. She strutted back towards the diner and lit a cigarette beneath the neon awning, cradling her hand to protect her lighter from the wind. Her blurry face glowed. For a while the two of them watched her in near silence, interrupted only by Amelia’s occasional sniffs.

“Since the last one went so well, I have another question,” she said.

He smiled. “Shoot.”

“Where do we go from here?”

Aaron watched the woman. “We could just take things slowly and see where we end up.”

“I’m not in any rush,” she said. “Despite what I might have acted like before, you know,” she glanced at his waist.

“I wasn’t complaining, was I?”

Her lips lifted. “No, I don’t think you were.”

She looked at her hands. They were flexing.

“I have to get going,” he said. He needed to be home for dinner with Jack. “But I can stay if you need me to sit with you for a while.”

“No. This happens sometimes. I’ll be fine, go.”

“Please call me when you get home, okay? And drive safe.” Her head tilted to the side, eyes still raw.

“You too.”

He closed the door behind him and walked to his car, acutely aware of the smoking woman’s eyes following him, of the damp spot on his shirt where Amelia had cried, of his bedraggled appearance.


	11. Chapter 11

Penelope had a complicated relationship with privacy. Her setup at home was so locked down and protected that no one, not even the kind of people she hung out with, could get in or access it. At the same time, she had an obligation as a member of the team to be honest and uphold the law. And she was, under some umbrellas, breaking the law. No one could track that it was her, so it wasn’t like she would be pinned, but still.

It wasn’t like they were hurt by it or anything. It was all done out of love. If they didn’t like it she would stop, but none of them had asked her and so she continued on. It all began innocently. She didn’t know what to get Prentiss for her birthday back when they’d barely just started working with each other so she did a little bit of digging and found her wishlist on Amazon. Then it was simple: Prentiss wanted season one of Six Feet under on DVD, so Penelope bought her the entire series and mentioned that one time they talked about it and admitted they liked it. Emily was happy, Penelope was happy, everyone was happy and good. The same went for Rossi’s culinary knife set and Xbox Gold membership, Reid’s _Knitting for Dummies_ book (which she had scribbled out and corrected to _Geniuses_ ) and Tardis cookie jar, JJ’s jogging stroller and Sephora gift card, Hotch’s Blu-Ray player, and Morgan’s gym membership and new Makita drill set. They weren’t complaining.

She offered to install computer systems and might have accidentally slipped some hardware in that would help her know if they were being targeted by a tech-savvy unsub or a run-of-the-mill malware attack. She had, on more than one occasion, remotely attacked and eliminated a barrage of adware from Morgan’s computer and dropped hints about good antivirus programs. She protected them from things they didn’t even know existed and she was _fiiii-ine_ with that.

So it was completely logical to assume that something was up when suddenly Hotch reduced his credit card use by 50 percent. It was completely logical to follow the trend back to where it started, when he and her baby had to interview that wackjob piece of shit for four days in Pennsylvania. Hadn’t there been a little something off about Hotch after that trip? She couldn’t describe it but if she had to say anything she’d say that it was his eyes. They were off. Wider than usual or something, as if he was always just a little bit surprised. When they asked him and Morgan how it went his dimples had appeared for a second like he was going to smile but then he said ‘poorly’.

She just followed the breadcrumbs. Something had happened there, something connected to his reduced credit card use and increasing dependence on cash, to his mentions of ‘taking Jack to the park’ on days that had been overcast and drizzly.

There was no family in the Lewisburg area and Hotch had few friends outside of work. That left other connections—namely, cases. They’d worked a few cases in the general area, but nothing seemed to fit. Lewisburg had held but one other serial killer, Robert Hansen. There was no connection there either.

She looked through case files and lists of names with Lewisburg in mind, and then, like magic, everything came together.

She knew who she had to call.


	12. Chapter 12

The mid-October rain had given way to the more frigid days preceding November. He sat in the back, where conversations were muffled by the sounds of dishes being washed and orders yelled. He had his iPhone in front of him, playing silent videos of Jack’s summer soccer games. He jiggled his left foot, caught himself doing it, and pressed it to the floor.

After ten minutes of nervous waiting, the bells attached to the front door jingled.

She was wearing a big scarf and boots, corduroy shirt, jeans and jacket. When she slid across from him in the booth she was beaming, her cheeks rosy and nose a flushed pink.

“Hey,” she said. She was breathless, she must have parked far away, like he told her to on the phone last night. She pulled her hands out of her pockets and looked at the menu Aaron had the waitress bring for his lost date. “It’s been a while.”

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said. “We’ve had some tough cases and I have to put family first.”

“Of course. How old is your son?”

“Five.”

She opened her mouth and drew in a breath, as if to ask something else, but was interrupted by the arrival of a waitress. She ordered home fries and earl grey tea, he black coffee and hash browns. The waitress walked away and she leaned forward, chin resting on her hands like an interested student.

“Do you have a picture?” she asked.

He gave her a warning look and pulled out his wallet.

“This is about a year old, he’s bigger now.”

“My god, that smile! He’s going to be a problem in about ten years,” she said. In the photo, Jack beams at the camera before a mottled blue background. It was his preschool portrait, taken last fall. His eyes are huge and his smile wide. Maybe a bit too wide: whenever Jack smiled genuinely, his dimples were barely there. The effect of the photograph was that Jack looked surprised more than anything, as if he didn’t expect the flash. Aaron had been meaning to take him to a photographer and have some more natural portraits taken for months, but he didn’t have the time.

“Who takes care of him while you’re at work?” Amelia’s eyes were smooth, face expressionless save for a tiny wrinkle between her brows. She was testing the waters, seeing how far she could get, trying to figure him out. Judging by the pacing of her sentence and the pauses present in it, _at work_ also meant _out here with me_.

“A family friend.” He kept eye contact with her until she looked down, brushing back a strand of hair to tuck behind her ear. She was wearing earrings, he noticed, some small polished stones.

The waitress inserted herself between them. Aaron wasn’t hungry, but he wanted to be courteous after Amelia ordered something to eat. He salted his hash brown and put a forkful delicately in his mouth.

“How many cases have you had since we last met?” she asked. She stirred honey into her tea, emptied a container of cream into it.

“Two cases, three consults and lots more paperwork,” he said. He sipped the coffee. After all the police station fare he’d drank over the last ten-plus years, any variety pleased his taste buds. “How have you been doing?”

She sighed. “I don’t want every time we meet to be a check-up, I’ve got a shrink for that.” she said. “But since you asked, fine. I get up, I go to work, I come home. There are good days, there are bad days, and for the most part I’m okay.”

“I only ask because of how it went,” he said. He looked down.

“I get panic attacks. It’s something I live with, and there’s nothing I can do about that. On Friday I ended up bringing my romantic dinner in the bath with me, my body was so tense. Like you said, I adapt.”

Aaron cut a sliver of hash brown and dabbed it in a little pile of surplus salt.

“I wish I could have stayed longer.”

“I was fine, the drive was fine.” She sipped. “Listen, I don’t want you worrying about me so much, okay? You have better things to worry about.”

She bit a fry. When she looked up from her plate, her expression changed. “It isn’t that I don’t appreciate it, believe me. I just know you have better things to mull over.”

“Just because I work in the environment I work in doesn’t mean I can’t want to know if you’re okay.”

She smiled.

“I get that, and it’s very kind of you to say, but I don’t want my post-traumatic situation getting in the way of your investigation of someone else who is _currently in_ a traumatic situation. What if you were thinking about someone else’s wellbeing when I was where I was? I might not be here.”

“When we worked your case I had an infant at home and every waking second I wanted to be with him,” he said, lifting his mug to take a sip. “We still found you. I’ve got a team for a reason.”

“Just promise you won’t let me get in the way, okay?”

His mug stopped halfway to his mouth. He breathed deeply. He hated promises. “I’ll try.”

She moved a fry around her plate with her fork, dragging it in some ketchup. She looked to the side, at the paintings of creeks and mountains hanging on the wall of the café. When she sipped her tea, the surface of it quivered.

“You’ve been scared about me too,” he said. She stared at him for a moment, clearly stunned, then looked down and shook her head.

“I forget about that,” she said. She took her fork and circled it in the air towards him. “The whole profiler thing… It’s spooky.”

He shrugged. “Sorry. Here, let’s make a deal,” he opened his hands towards her. “We both try not to worry about each other. We don’t have to be perfect, just rational. Let’s just focus on our own lives a bit more, okay?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, deal. But if you think you can stop me fr—oh.”

She tapped her fork in her plate.

“You have to get that, don’t you?”

He nodded. “I’m afraid so.” He looked down at his phone, lit up with a text from Garcia: _Three victims, first found two weeks ago, second three days ago, third yesterday. College student missing. Dallas PD needs us._

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you soon.”

He shoved his phone in his pocket and dropped three tens on the table. He needed to get back fast, otherwise they’d be suspicious. It was going to happen sometime, it was to be expected really, he should have just—

He’d walked right in to her, not realizing she was standing. She wrapped her arms around him and he smelled her shampoo again, her scalp.

“I won’t worry,” she whispered, “but you’ll be on my mind.”

He wished he could stay that way with her more than anything.


End file.
